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Cited by 305

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 88 of the 88 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About?

Ben-David, Itzhak, Li, Jiacui, Rossi, Andrea, Song, Yang·2022·The Review of Financial Studies
DOI 10.1093/rfs/hhab081
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Abstract

We show that mutual fund investors rely on simple signals and likely do not engage in sophisticated learning about managers’ alpha as widely believed. Simplistic performance chasing best explains aggregate flows to the mutual fund space and flows across funds. These results hold for both actively managed and passive index funds. Empirical patterns commonly interpreted as reflecting learning about managerial skill also appear in falsification tests and are mechanical. Our results are consistent with the view that, on average, households are homo sapiens with limited financial sophistication rather than hyperrational alpha-maximizing agents, as often assumed in the literature.

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Metadata

Authors
Ben-David, I., Li, J., Rossi, A., & Song, Y.
Venue
The Review of Financial Studies
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2021-07-14
Volume
35
Issue
4
Pages
1723-1774
ISSN
  • 0893-9454 (ISSN-L)
  • 1465-7368
DOI
10.1093/rfs/hhab081
OpenAlex
W2931476879
Cited by
305
References
88
FWCI
39.27
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/rfs/hhab081
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Ben-David, I., Li, J., Rossi, A., & Song, Y. (2022). What Do Mutual Fund Investors Really Care About? The Review of Financial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhab081

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

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